PAKISTAN: Army engineers struggle around the clock in earthquake-hit northwest to reopen destroyed hill roads, as people living in remote villages still wait for relief.

Record ID: 528069

  • Title: PAKISTAN: Army engineers struggle around the clock in earthquake-hit northwest to reopen destroyed hill roads, as people living in remote villages still wait for relief.
  • Date: 28th October 2005
  • Summary: LABOURERS UNLOADING TENTS FROM TRUCK TENTS BEING STACKED
  • Embargoed: 12th November 2005 12:00
  • Keywords:
  • Location: Pakistan
  • Country: Pakistan
  • Topics: Disasters / Accidents / Natural catastrophes
  • Reuters ID: LVA1IQMV0PWRQHXM4MF8UJLYEE4I
  • Story Text: Army engineers are struggling around the clock in Pakistan's earthquake-hit northwest to reopen destroyed hill roads, as people living in remote villages still wait
    for relief.
    With around 3 million people needing shelter from the harsh Himalayan winter now just a few weeks away and enough food stockpiled to survive it, relief workers say locals
    need tents, food and bedding.
    Underlining the magnitude of the task, bad weather in the mountains grounded the vital helicopter fleet at the main airbase near Islamabad on Wednesday (October 26),
    leaving only mules and people to carry supplies up into the hills.
    The few roads into the mountains have been blocked by landslides or swept away. Some will take weeks to repair, leaving helicopters as the main means of delivering food
    and shelter. But the fleet of aid helicopters, although growing, cannot reach them all, or deliver enough.
    The U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) has sent 600 tents to Seran and another small town in the Jhelum Valley, which had a population of 300,000.
    Residents of Seran, a small town in Pakistani Kashmir's Jhelum valley waited on Wednesday to receive tents to take back up the hills after the UNHCR dropped off 200 family
    tents before heading further up the valley to another town that has just been opened up, more than two weeks after the quake.
    Relief workers say just providing tents is not the solution, and are suggesting that survivors of Pakistan's devastating earthquake, which killed over 54,000 people,
    come down from the mountains to where they could be looked after.
    They plan to set up tent villages where they will be in a better position to provide food, nutrition and schooling until the survivors can somehow get re-established.
    "They (UNHCR) have endorsed our idea of the tent villages, the camp, and they have provided us 200 tents,"
    said Muhammad Mushtaq Khan, a doctor in Seran who is helping to organise relief efforts.
    "And they've endorsed the whole plan of the tent village of this Jhelum valley and they have said Insha Allah (God willing) they will provide us the tents for all
    those mentioned areas of the tent villages, like Chakothi, Chinari, Garh Dama, Hattian Bala and Seran."
    But many survivors do not want to move to any tent village, arguing that they cannot leave their ancestral places where all their wealth - houses, land and crops -
    are.
    It's an attitude adding to the frustrations of relief workers trying to help hundreds of thousands of people in the rugged Himalayan foothills of northern Pakistan who
    lived through the October 8 earthquake.
    About 450,000 tents are needed, nearly 100,000 have been distributed and another 200,000 are in the pipeline, said the International Federation of Red Cross and Red
    Cross Societies, which doubled its aid appeal to 117 million U.S. dollars (USD).
    That leaves relief workers 150,000 short with hundreds of thousands of people remaining cut off in the mountains, where night temperatures are already below freezing.
    Aid officials say it is inevitable that some people will not get these tents before the winter starts coming in, which will leave them with the choice to either spend
    winter without shelter - which they will not be able to do - or to go down to the valley which means they will need provision for tents cities or temporary shelter in the
    valleys.
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